So the blue mikey finally arrived this morning and actually feels like quite a solid unit, first impressions are the switch on the back worries me a little bit and feels like an afterthought so i think i'll probably NOT be using the sensitivity that much. I'll be testing the device on soundcloud, using my own ftp and also on audioboo even thou the unit unofficially should not currently work with the iphone. read on about my initial thoughts and i will keep this blog post updated as i find/noticed something new.
some of the things i noticed while testing the blue mikey. .
on the iphone i get some weird noises
as you might know the iphone is not officially supported and i have noticed that at times you get some strange noises played BACK through the mic as it tries to use it as a speaker. I also noticed that it asks to turn the phone onto airplane mode to reduce interference. obviously doing this makes the device totally unusualably for doing audioboo because you need a network connection to be able to send your data. it does however still make it ok to use with FiRE because you can batch your recordings, quit the app, turn off the airplane mode and then send them up in batch upload after. not realtime, live audio but at least you will not lose that golden interview.
audioboo on the ipod touch 8gb first series
i get the message - "application not compatible, this applicaiton can only be used on an iphone" - i'm pretty sure other people have it working on the ipod touch so maybe it just does'nt work with the first revision of ipod 8gb touch that i have. do you have audioboo working on the ipod if so which version are you running? - anybody using the latest nano with audioboo and the blue mikey. it might be a solution i have to look at.
using FiRE and soundcloud or ftp a match made in heaven!
one of the really great things about using FiRE over audioboo is that you have the ability to record bulk interviews and even edit snippits or put markers in the audio to some of the best bits. i have yet to really use this to the full potential but i can see this becoming a really good way forward to using recordings. another thing is that aside from using the soundcloud platform (as it is pricy) you can use ftp - this is pretty nice as you could use something like mosso cloudfiles to push you mp3 too and then have a script setup to pull in your audio and do twitter notifications - something i intend to work on as i already have some code for building up an rss feed from the contents of a folder using php. i intend to drop a message to the FiRE developers to see if they will put in support for amazon s3 as well.
More updates to this post as i use it. You can find my profile on audioboo here and over on soundcloud here
*update*
using the blue mikey with other applications
i just tried to use the blue mikey with some other applications that do not natively support the external microphone. once the mic is recognized the unit gives off a high pitch squeel until an application that knows about the mic is used. i found that in FiRE the unit gets detected after a few little sounds are made and then it goes quite ready to record with.
testing with bambuser
after loading the application once i had installed the unit it gave off the high pitch scream again until i actually started recording but i could not tell any difference from using the onboard microphone of the iphone thinking that the blue mic was not actually supported. i had hoped that by plugging in the device it might get automatically detected and used but it seems that the software needs a special driver. I have asked @bluemic on twitter if they have a driver/code class that iphone app writers can use to enable the device in their applications. it would be really neat if bambuser/qik would start enabling these hardware devices so we can at least capture better quality audio even if the video quality is not up to much.
